Turnarounds

Joseph Murphy | November 29, 2010

San Francisco Jazz Collective; Live 2008 Concert Tour The Music of Wayne Shorter:

If you have not yet heard the SFJC – OK, call it a West Coast version of the LCJO if you must with its embrace of repertoire but similarities end there – this mostly live set of their 2008 tour which stressed the work of Wayne Shorter is a fine place to start,

But it’s not the cast of heavyweights (including Joe Lovano, Dave Douglas, Renee Rosnes, Stefon Harris, Miguel Zenon, Robin Eubanks and the powerhouse drummer Eric Harland) it’s the stunning arrangements- and luminous recording – of our greatest living jazz composer that sets this recording apart.

Rumor has it that the 2011 version of the SFJC will be taking on the music of Stevie Wonder in performance at the Portland Jazz Fest in February.

Bobby Hutcherson; Wise One, Kind of Blue Records

My favorite of the recent Coltrane tributes, Wise One shows the mastery of phrasing and depth of soul that mark the work of Bobby Hutcherson. Although he never recorded with Trane in his lifetime, Bobby’s intimate knowledge of blues phrase and devotional feeling in Coltrane’s music is unmistakable throughout.

From the diamond edged sketch of Like Sonny to the modal Gospel of Spiritual, Bobby and a stellar quartet that features Anthony Wilson on guitar invoke all the mystery and majesty of Coltrane’s enduring opus.

Jason Moran; Ten; Blue Note Records

If your thing is jazz piano then welcome to the golden age. The generational range from Brubeck to Eldar is alone breathtaking in its scope of knowledge and approach. Technique and individuality abound, the jazz glass ceiling definitively shattered at the hands of Jessica Williams, Geri Allen and Marilyn Crispell, the modern masters Hancock, Corea and Jarrett still at the top of their game while Cecil Taylor ever his bad magisterial self.

Still, Jason Moran has emerged as a singular voice. Ruminative but not brooding, harmonically complex but never obtuse, powerful but sustained with a musical home bred in the blues, Jacki Byard modernist (four beat) stride and Bud Powell colors.

Here, celebrating the Tenth anniversary of his working trio, Bandwagon, Moran, with Taurus Mateen and Nasheet Waits, takes the blues with just a soupcon of funk but never leaves home. Check out his take on Monk’s “Crepescule With Nellie” for a manifesto as Jason takes it shorn of ornament and distilled with tenderness. A rare totality of feeing suffuses this outing that eclipses even the most unified model of the piano trio.

Power in restraint.

Anthony Braxton; The Complete Arista Recordings Mosaic Records

Yes, it is a mystery on a par with black holes and the appeal of the Tea Party that in 1972 – a time when fusion scoured the jazz landscape for the coming Marsalis restoration – a major American label signed America’s most outside experimentalist as a ‘crossover’ act.

But that is exactly what Arista’s Steve Becker did and so began the documentation of Anthony Braxton’s Seventies output

Braxton and Becker’s coup made the former the first musician to emerge to the light from Muhal Richard Abrams tutored Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and Braxton made the most of it:

A big band breathtaking in risk, dexterity and color, Quartets With Dave Holland, Kenney Wheeler and Barry Althschul that swing like crazy in serial toned counterpoint, Ivesian chamber music, duets with Fredric Rezewski and Ursula Oppens a disc of solo alto sax. Braxton’s multitudes were uncontained.

Braxton is an American iconoclast whose peers are probably as much Charles Ives and Harry Partch as Bird and Duke. A composer who builds structures around discrete musical languages to the effect of written improvisation.

But dig his solo alto take on “Red Top” if you need jazz bonafides and open your ears to all the territories this Chicago bred son of the Great Migration has set out to explore.